Cochrane policy and practice recommendations with respect to study identification are available in the ‘Searching for studies’ chapter of The Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions. The chapter is authored by and on behalf of members of the Cochrane Information Retrieval Methods Group.

Reports of the work of the Group, by Carol Lefebvre, Steve Pritchard and Alison Weightman, were published in the Cochrane Methods Groups' Newsletters in June 2004 and 2005; by Carol Lefebvre, Alison Weightman, Jessie McGowan and Bernadette Coles in June 2006, 2007 and 2009; and in 'Cochrane Methods' by Julie Glanville, Carol Lefebvre, Jessie McGowan, Alison Weightman and Bernadette Coles in 2010 -2018.